Thursday, June 18, 2015

Everything Before Us (Romance 2015)

So I've been following the guys over at Wong Fu Productions ever since they started out as new, talented Youtubers. Since the mid-2000s they've created many great shorts and one mini movie that I reviewed back in the day. This film was a ton better; goes to show what close to a decade of work and experience can do.

So yeah this movie is a touchy-feely type of romantic flick. It follows around two couples as they go through life in a kinda odd world where people have an emotional integrity score garnered from past relationship experiences. This score is much like a credit score in that it can make or break one's career or getting a loan and such. It was an interesting angle to take, but beneath this premise, the story further bolstered the well-known fact of how relationships are all non-linear and quite complicated.

I liked how the two couples were very different in that the first set followed a HS relationship through to college, while the secondary one was more grounded in the post-college career world. I think I would've had more of a connection with the film if I were a youngin' back in college watching this, but everything was still relatable.

This movie wasn't necessarily solid as it still faltered in some places like missing plot transitions and some occasional overacting , but it was indeed much better than many movies I've seen as of late that had a much larger budget.

The main set of props goes out to the creators who totally followed their dreams of making movies and other visual media and they seemed to have succeeded. The story, cinematography, transitions, music selection and integration were all spot on. They did a really good job considering they did all the work with no big-money support. So yeah gold star for taking a risk in life.

So would this film survive as a standalone in the box offices? No, mainly because these days the average movie-goer mainly expects a lot of special effects and/or tier 1 actors. Would this film do well at any indi place? Definitely. It would take a slightly artsy crowd to appreciate what was created here, especially towards the end of the film. This was a good watch that was definitely worth the $5 streaming rental.Rating - B